This week in AI talent: Google lost the man who co-invented the Transformer and the man who won a Nobel Prize for AlphaFold. The market gives Google a 3.2% shot at building the best model. The exodus is now undeniable.
Noam Shazeer โ co-inventor of the Transformer, co-lead on Gemini โ joined OpenAI. Google paid $2.7 billion to bring him back from CharacterAI less than two years ago. Days later, John Jumper โ Nobel laureate, AlphaFold creator โ left DeepMind for Anthropic after nine years.
Seven of the eight authors of “Attention Is All You Need” have now left Google. They founded Cohere, Essential AI ($1B valuation), Sakana AI, Inceptive (RNA design), and NEAR Protocol. The paper that enabled $10 trillion in market value was written at Google โ almost none of the authors stayed.
The key insight:Google doesn’t have a talent problem. Google has a product-culture problem that manifests as a talent problem. The researchers leave because they can ship faster elsewhere.
What to Watch Next Week
1. Whether Google makes a structural response or just raises retention bonuses
2. Anthropic’s next move with Jumper โ does a science division get announced?
3. The last Transformer author still at Google โ most watched researcher in AI
Business Engineer Framework
The AI Supercycle โ Where Talent Flows, Value Follows
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur, HackerNoon and Search Engine People. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
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